After finishing our mock exams, we wondered what was next for our journey in Year 12 Biology. Then, we discovered a competition through our teacher, Mrs Chehade, who introduced us to the Kew Gardens Green Careers Endeavour Challenge. She encouraged us to explore more about the challenge, where we had to create a podcast exploring the diverse range of green careers and the significance of them in an increasingly sustainable world and supported us in our choices and decisions whilst we researched, edited, drafted and enjoyed most of the process! Our whole class was involved in the creation of this project, and we were all inspired by the previous Year 12s (and current 13s), who won the challenge last year. We were also incentivised by the £1000 prize, which would be highly beneficial for the biology department, so we put in all our efforts to win!

After finding out about the competition, we had to elect a leader who created subteams to specialise and focus on a particular green career. The careers that we focused our podcast on were a seedbank scientist, a plant chemist, and a botanical artist. Once delegating members of the class to different sub-teams, each group did research on their assigned career and shared their findings with myself. One of the members of the botanical artistry team even produced an intricate drawing of a hibiscus flower (see below), in an attempt to emulate the workings of a botanical artist. We collated the research of each group, and a rough script was written, which we based our podcast discussion upon. The recording of the podcast took over 2 hours for only around 6 minutes that we included in our final cut.

Link to our podcast Podcast_final.mp3

We were extremely proud to be informed we had won, that our efforts had paid off and that we join the Kew gardens winners list at SGS.

Overall, what this experience taught us was that you can never be too ambitious. Whilst we were thrilled to take part, we knew that we were up against some incredibly talented students from across the country, with winning seeming to be a distant dream to us. After hours of researching and rehearsing (and AT LEAST 50 retakes), our hard work eventually paid off. The recording was done during one of the hottest days of the year, so I would like to commend the team for the long, arduous effort we all produced to meet the deadline. On the topic of extreme weather conditions, this experience has been a real eye-opener to the effects of climate change on our everyday lives. This may seem like a tedious and repetitive message, but the importance of everyone doing their part in helping the environment is vital, with the green careers mentioned representing the initiative and attention that should inspire us to do the same. To younger students reading this, we hope that you benefit from the money provided to our biology department and encourage you to participate in competitions like these yourselves. Who knows- with effort and teamwork, you could be the next winners!

Zain, Thataniesh, Reem, Rugved, Ayub, David, Monika, Rishi, Nadira, Rishabh, Trishanth and Patrik of 12D